The End Of Oak Street

Little Acorns

The End Of Oak Street
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
USA  2026
Warner Brothers
UK Cinema Release Print 
(unfortunately... I didn’t know!).

Warning: Very minor spoilers.

So this was better than I expected and, to be fair, I wasn’t going to bother with The End Of Oak Street. I mean, c’mon, I’d seen the trailers... which made it look like a reboot of an old episode of The Twilight Zone at best and, certainly, yet another recycled 1930s-50s sci-fi idea ransacked for modern, literature starved, cinema audiences. Which... to be fair... it is. 

Then I found out it was written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, who wrote and directed two startlingly good films of recent years. Namely, the amazing It Follows (reviewed by me here) and the even more brilliant Under The Silver Lake (reviewed by me here). So as bad as the trailer made it out to be (which seems to be a common problem with modern trailers, as I’ve mentioned before... they just don’t sell the movie)... I knew I would have to go and see it on the strength of the writer/director. 

And, yeah, okay... there’s nothing new here. You’ve seen (and almost certainly read) something like this before but... just as It Follows was a great take on making a film with the style of an old, 1980s John Carpenter horror movie, The End Of Oak Street is an example of making a film which both looks... and is set in... a Spielbergian slice of early to mid 1980s American suburbia blockbuster. Even down to composer Michael Giacchino’s pitch perfect, on-the-nose imitation, John Williams style score (although, to be fair, it’s a Giacchino style score too... which often sounds very similar anyway). Although why a teenager in the 1980s is reading what looks to be a 1950s copy of Playboy under the covers is anybody’s guess.

The story is about a disfunctional family unit played by Ewan McGregor (the dad), Anne Hathaway (the mum) plus Maisy Stella and Christian Convery (their kids). Things aren’t going well but, similar to what happens in Valley Of The Dragons (review coming soon and also, eventually, the book it was based on, Jules Verne’s Off On A Comet), a ripple in time displaces some people but only temporally. So the whole, large neighbourhood, in this case, is snatched up and dragged back to prehistoric times. A fight for survival midst dinosaur shenanigans ensues. 

And there are no real surprises but, like I said, the whole thing is pretty well done, has some great acting and... while it has its problems, it does get from A to B in an entertaining and relatively thrilling fashion and it’s certainly a good, large screen spectacle to keep audiences pleased.

Now, if I had one minor problem for a David Robert Mitchell film it’s this... it feels a lot like it’s pulling its punches. 

For example, anyone who even saw the trailer will be suspecting a certain death scene coming up from very early on. The family unit has some problems which a struggle for survival and the death of a character would fix (although the writer’s pick for the ‘gets eaten by a dino’ death is not quite as young as I was expecting). However, I did feel like the movie was soft soaping things and trying to have its cake and eat it at the same time. There is a deux ex machina ‘undo’ button at one point which, personally, I thought was totally unnecessary and certainly a less happy ending seemed to be the one this film deserved. And even the lesbian relationship subtext, which I also saw coming, is hardly hinted at and not made as blatant as I suspect the director wanted. 

Now, I don’t know if all of this is studio interference but, well, one thing which did bother me about this movie... and I would have certainly stayed away from cinemas if I’d know it... is that I hadn’t realised the film had been cut for UK audiences. They deliberately toned it down for us so they could get more people in by calling it a 12A instead of a 15 certificate and, frankly, I’m appalled. The BBFC really ought to be called out for the absolute evil people they are. Don’t allow greedy film-makers to soft soap their art just to appease stupid censors... just make everything either an 18 or a U. End of story. 

So, yeah, The End Oak Street is a nice little entry into the science fiction genre and I’d certainly recommend it to some but, what all this means is that a) I’m going to have to buy the Blu Ray when it gets released so I can see the full cut and b) there’s no way I’m buying British on this thing. I’ll have to import a US Blu Ray like every other sane, movie lover would do when faced by the vile horror of the British Board Of Film Censors. I wish we could scoop them up and send them back to prehistoric times, for sure. 

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection

Severotica Arsan

Saga Erotica - 
The Emmanuelle Collection
11 Disc Boxed Edition

Hi all, much like I did with my entry on Severin’s beautiful Al Adamson The Masterpiece Collection Blu Ray set (right here), I thought I’d finish up my recent season of Emmanuelle Arsan at NUTS4R2 reviews with a quick breakdown of some of the extras found on Severin Films’ beautiful Blu Ray collection, with links back to the reviews of the films in the set on the blog, a couple of lines about a few of the extras I’ve actually got around to watching plus, if you like, an index review at the end of all my reviews in this season. So you can use this page as a link page to some stuff and also maybe to understand why you might maybe want to pick up a copy of this set for yourself, while it’s still available.



EMMANUELLE
Disc 1 
UHD in two cuts with an audio commentary With film historian Elizabeth Purchell (Director's Cut Only)
French Trailer


Disc 2: Blu Ray contents as the above disc but also with the following special features.
A Slightly Scandalous Character – Interview With Actress Marika Green
Producing EMMANUELLE – Interview With Producer Yves Rousset-Rouard
Filming EMMANUELLE – Interview With Camera Operator Robert Fraisse
Fabric & Fantasy: Costume As Character Development – Video Essay By Fashion And Costume Historian Elissa Rose
The Channel – Actress Liane Curtis On Her Mother, Dubbing Artist Paulette Rubinstein
    
Interview With Marayat Rollet-Andriane (aka Emmanuelle Arsan) On The Set Of THE SAND PEBBLES (1966)
This is a short, black and white, fairly standard interview with the lady herself doing promotion for the The Sand Pebbles (which I reviewed here). She reveals she has been signed to Fox for a number of pictures and she’s looking forward to making another film soon. Sadly, the only other Fox project she was involved in was an episode of The Big Valley and it was not until her role in Laure (reviewed by me here in another Severin edition) that she had any other experiences on a movie set.

The Joys Of Emmanuelle, Part 1 – Interviews With Star Sylvia Kristel, Director Just Jaeckin And Producer Yves Rousset-Rouard
This is the first of a three part documentary directed by Severin co-owner, the great David Gregory and reveals all about the making of the film. How Kristel got involved almost by accident and then went for it because her boyfriend said nobody would be able to see it as, if they were doing the book, it would be uncertifiable. Also, the director of the movie tells about the day they all got arrested and spent a day in a Thai prison for filming in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, just why he didn’t want the ‘cigar smoking’ scene in the film, feeling that it would turn it into cheap, softcore pornography which is what he didn’t want for the movie. Also, the producer tells a story which I’ve heard a number of times on a number of movies in that, the film was so succesful that there weren’t enough prints to cope with the demand and so motorcyle couriers had to rush back and forth between cinemas, delivering each reel as it became free, from one cinema to another. 

French Trailer
U.S. Trailer

Disc 3: Blu-ray (Special Features)
Signed, Emmanuelle Arsan – Interview With Camille Moreau, Author Of Emmanuelle Arsan: Biography of a Pseudonym
Very much on the same page as me on my best guesses on who Emmanuelle Arsan really was, Arsan biographer Camille Moreau talks about the combined pseuedonym of their collaborative creation and also the use of the name by other writers, by the time they were putting the Emmanuelle magazine out in France (much like, I suspect, Michael Moorcock’s loan to many New Worlds writers of his Eternal Champion variant jerry Cornelius for a time). Not only is Moreau convinced the pseudonym was a collaboration by the wife and the husband (who was in the French resistance during the war, it turns out) but she also gives us her opinion that the rumours of Arsan’s alleged involvement with Steve McQueen while the two were making The Sand Pebbles were just that... a rumour (I’m still unsure myself, now I know what McQueen did directly after finishing that film... if anyone was running from somethign it was surely him at that point?). She also gives vent on her hatred of the use of the famous wicker chair to sell the movie versions as their iconography.

Interview With Director Just Jaeckin For FILMO TV
    
A Hard Look (2000) – TV Documentary By Filmmaker Alex Cox
Well it’s hard not to recommend anything directed by ALex Cox and this critical look at the first Emamanulle film, its impact on popular culture and the various cinematic strands it spawned is no exception. It also takes a very ‘ask the public’ approach to both the films and the sexuality it inspired in its audience. My one criticism is that, at some point, it must have had some captions explaining who the various talking heads were but, unfortunately, this print of the documentary has none. 

Emmanuelle In Ontario – Video Essay On The Canadian Censorship Battle By Journalist Eric Veillette
A short 'does what it says on the tin' documentary listing the banning, then unbanning but severely mutilated screenings of the film in Ontario in Canada. These censors are, like all of them seem to be, completely evil and should probably be destroyed. 



EMMANUELLE 2 (1975)
Disc 4: UHD (Film + Special Features) 
Audio Commentary With Film Historian Elizabeth Purchell And Filmmaker Gillian Wallace Horvat
International Trailer
U.S. Trailer

Disc 5: Blu-ray (Film + Special Features)
Audio Commentary With Film Historian Elizabeth Purchell And Filmmaker Gillian Wallace Horvat
Audio Interview With Director Francis Giacobetti
Producing EMMANUELLE 2 – Interview With Producer Yves Rousset-Rouard
Filming EMMANUELLE 2 – Interview With Cinematographer Robert Fraisse

Mondo Emmanuelle – Ethnography And Softcore With Dr. Jennifer Moorman, Assistant Professor Of Communication And Media Studies
One of the best extras in the set, for my money, Dr. Moorman looks at ethnography and anthropology and talks about what she calls the ‘porno-ethnographic colonising gaze’ of the Emmanuelle films and the way various peoples and cultures have been depicted in American and European cinema... starting off with Nanook Of The North from 1922 and taking us through with films like Mondo Cane in 1962 until she gets to the films featured in this set. This look starts off with The Great Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park in 1851 and the Chicago Worlds Fair from 1893 to demonstrate how the various cultures are represented in a posed way to live up to certain Western expectations.

Filming Report For Swiss TV

The Joys Of Emmanuelle, Part 2 – Interviews With Star Sylvia Kristel And Producer Yves Rousset-Rouard
David Gregory’s second featurette covers Emmanuelle 2 and tells how the producer was told by the French board of censors that his film was definitely not pornographic. However, they wanted to make an example of it so they slapped it with an X certificate anyway. In response, the producer held a press conference and told the French people that he would not screen the film in its home country of France until that censorship decision was overturned... and he proceeded to release it to much success internationally instead. It took two years for the censorship decision to be overturned and so the release was delayed for two years in France. 

International Trailer
U.S. Trailer
Radio Spots

Disc 6: Soundtrack CD


GOODBYE EMMANUELLE (1977)
Disc 7: UHD (Film + Special Features)
Audio Commentary With Film Writer/Professor Of Modern Culture And Media Dr. Veronica Fitzpatrick
International Trailer
U.S. Trailer

Disc 8: Blu-ray (Film + Special Features)
Audio Commentary With Film Writer/Professor Of Modern Culture And Media Dr. Veronica Fitzpatrick
 Beyond Emmanuelle: Sylvia Kristel's Life And Career – Interviews With Jeremy Richey, Author Of Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle To Chabrol, And Leila Wimmer, Senior Lecturer In Film Studies At London Metropolitan University

Audio Erotica – The Music Of The Emmanuelle Series With Soundtrack Journalist Daniel Schweiger
A nice little extra. All I’m saying is... as always... if you want somebody to come in and talk about soundtracks, get Daniel Schweiger.


The Joys Of Emmanuelle, Part 3 – Interviews With Star Sylvia Kristel And Producer Yves Rousset-Rouard
The third part of Gregory’s documentary comments on the third movie plus some of the bandwagon films which came out. Also, a lovely moment in one of the interviews where Sylvia Kristel shows us some of her paintings, which she exhibited in her gallery in Amsterdam. Nice to see.

International Trailer
U.S. Trailer
Radio Spots



I, EMMANUELLE (1969) 
The best film in the set I reckon but I just haven't had the time to watch any of the extras... sorry folks.

Disc 9: UHD (Film + Special Features)
Audio Commentary With Film Historian Dr. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Trailer

Disc 10: Blu-ray (Film + Special Features)
Introduction By Kier-La Janisse, Author Of House Of Psychotic Women
Audio Commentary With Film Historian Dr. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
A Director À La Française – Interview With Director Cesare Canevari
Memoirs Of Emmanuelle – Interview With Actress Erika Blanc
A Man For Emmanuelle – Interview With Actor Sandro Pizzochero
Protagonist And Subject – Video Essay By Filmmaker Carl Elsaesser
Concerning Emmanuelle – Archival Interview With Cesare Canevari
Trailer

Disc 11: Soundtrack CD

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection
 

Emmanuelle (2024)

Eyes Without A Gaze

Emmanuelle (2024)
Directed by Audrey Diwan
France/USA 2024
Pathe Zone B Blu Ray


Okay... I was so thrown by this anniversary ‘remake’ of Emmanuelle that I almost don’t know where to start and am unsure  as to whether I should completely condemn it or admit that some of the elements of the film work as their own thing... without having anything to do with the franchise it was supposed to be celebrating. I’ve seen some of the comments about this and can well understand the disappointment and vitriol aimed at this movie and, I think it’s because the film really is a sheep hiding in wolf’s clothing. I’ve also read some of the director’s rationale behind making this from a feminist perspective and her shift to ‘the female gaze’ as opposed to the male and making this film from a feminine point of view. 

So okay, before I throw up some merits I believe the film has, I need to address some of the things that are wrong with it because, it irks me that something which is supposed to fit in with the famous (and rightly notorious, if you’ve read my reviews of the books) property is so antiseptic in its outlook. 

So let’s first look at the director. This film came out 50 years after the famous 1974 adaptation and is therefore, one would assume, something made to mark that occasion. However, the director has gone on record saying she’s never seen the original film. Why do modern day movie makers somehow seem to think it’s impressive not to be familiar with the source of their creations... it just makes you seem like sloppy examples of cast and crew (the number of superhero actors and actresses who say they’ve never read a comic annoys me in a similar manner)? However, she was given Emmanuelle Arsan’s original novel to read and, honestly, apart from one (maybe two) scenes in the film... this is completely divorced from that novel too. 

I mean, Emmanuelle, as played here by Noémie Merlant, embodies none of the characteristics of the original character and, as importantly, the film misunderstands... I feel... the basic tenets of Marryat Rollett-Andriane (aka Emmanuelle Arsan) and her husband’s philosophies revolving around love and sex. The whole point of those novels is that the young Emmanuelle is married and she and her husband enhance, strengthen and maintain their bond by having sexual adventures (both apart and sometimes together) with other people. It’s about free love and the way sex can sometimes bring one closer to one’s other half (I’ve witnessed this effect in real life). Emmanuelle, as she is in the books and the first two movie adaptations, is a smart (but often naive), fun loving, joyful creature who is up for anything, mostly on her own terms and wed to a rich husband who can fund her playgirl lifestyle. 

In this modern incarnation, Emmanuelle is a fair bit older than the original character, is not married, has a job as a hotel inspector and, as the bitter cherry on the poison cake, while still being somewhat sexually adventurous (kinda) she’s stoic, aloof, distant, cold, mostly humourless and somewhat disconnected from humanity. This is not Emmanuelle in any way, shape or form. Both the spirit of the character and of the initial books/films is completely lost here. 

And as far as the dominant female gaze here... yes, I’m a bloke so I’m never going to be an authority on such things (or should even be warranted thoughts on the matter) but, I should point out that the original Emmanuelle certainly had her own agency and, especially in the case of the Black Emanuelle films, she was definitely a confident, feminist woman in a series of films which have been very much re-evaluated and recognised as such. So this new incarnation, which seems almost to reject Arsan’s spirit and ideas, just doesn’t seem to work for me. I mean, the film is not boring, as many people seem to suggest and it’s also not a bad movie (although certainly a very bad Emmanuelle movie) but if I were to actually believe this movie is a representation of what women want to see then, alas, my takeaway would be that women don’t really like sex and can take it or leave it. 

Also, there’s a bit more nudity than people are saying in the film but, not much (not even as much as the 1974 film and that was not exactly loaded with the female form) and many of the sex scenes are either clothed or executed without showing many, or oftimes any, sexual body parts of the participants. 

There are one, possibly two scenes that are reflective of the original novel. The movie opens with a version of the airline sex scene (but much tamer) which opened the book and was relocated to another part of the original movie (and also opened the first Black Emanuelle film if memory serves). It takes the form of a pre-title sequence but, I don’t think it’s all that strong an opening to the film, I would say. 

The other scene which may be an homage to the masturbation scene with Emmanuelle and the underage girl (13) in the book (and slightly less underage girl, 17, in the original film) is half recreated here with this film’s Emmanuelle and someone who turns out to be a female escort (if I understood it correctly). It feels like it’s almost there by accident or is just a passing, token homage, to be fair.

And that’s it. Now let me tell you what the film seems to be on its own terms...

Well, it’s beautifully shot with nice use of slow camera movement which is also used to highlight travelling cuts which bring back zooms in or out on the same scene in one fluid motion. The film tries to be erotic by using things like a visual montage of people rubbing things (such as cleaners wiping bannisters in the hotel run by Margot Parson, played by Naomi Watts) and I am assuming that this is an attempt to subliminally arouse the senses of the audience but, well, for me it just fell flat and didn’t move the blood or quicken the heart in the way it might be hoped (admittedly, this is apparently a deliberate tactic of the director... but then you just have nothing really happening so, why?). The film does tend to live in a voyeuristic world but, again, it has none of the carefree spirit of the original works.

I was especially on the alert after we see the lead taking a bath in her hotel room near the start of the film because, shortly after, in the very next scene, she informs somebody she has just taken a shower. Which is obviously a glaring continuity error and makes me think the bath scene maybe replaced the shower from an earlier version of the script but the scene straight after was not reshot to match up with the content of that footage. So, yeah, I was immediately on guard after this small moment. 

And I did kind of enjoy watching these bored and disillusioned people wandering about aimlessly in an upperclass, exclusive, rich person’s world and have meaningless conversations. Noémie Merlant’s almost deadpan performance is actually quite good, just completely wrong for Emmanuelle... but she’s playing her as it’s been written, not as a credible version of the original character. And I loved the score by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine which, alas, is not released as a standalone CD (no, seriously, don’t give me your stupid digital downloads, I want the proper, physical release please). I mean, it’s not the kind of score you’d expect or want in an Emmanuelle film but, as I think I’ve argued throughout this review, this really isn’t an Emmanuelle film and has none of that spirit about it anyway so, why not?

So, at the end of the day, it’s not a terrible film by any means but, it’s not an Emmanuelle movie (although I can see why some people, even those unfamiliar with the original works, would find this sluggish compared to whatever else they are watching). It’s almost like the director was handed the keys to the kingdom for the fiftieth anniversary and deliberately undermined the essence of the original and just wanted this to be a slap in the face of the male and female fans of the original (don’t forget, that original movie was released mainstream and was a popular ‘couples’ movie with a dominant female audience, from what I have heard). So, yeah, I’m guessing most people will take ot or more likely leave this incarnation but, it’s not completely without merit... just don’t judge it against your deserved expectations of the film, for sure. 

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

Laure (aka Forever Emmanuelle)

Emm-Annie-Belle

Laure
aka Forever Emmanuelle
Directed by Emmanuelle Arsan/
Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane and
Roberto D’Ettorri Piazzoli 
Italy/France 1976
Severin DVD Region 0

Warning: Light spoilers.

Well, here we go again. Laure is the movie adaptation (possibly, I’ll address that because… I have a theory) of Emmanuelle Arsan’s book of the same name (reviewed by me here). And you can read my book review for the story content of what goes on as directed above… I’m wasting no time on the plot here.

But here’s the thing... as Severin’s DVD* sleeve promotes it, “The Uncensored Erotic Odyssey Co-Starting, Written and Directed by the Real-Life Emmanuelle”. And at least some of that is true. She has a large role as Myrte here so, if you were ever wondering what the real life Emmanuelle looked like… well… there’s a lot of her on show, so you won’t be disappointed.

Whether she actually directed this is debatable. Certainly both her husband and constant collaborator Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane, were a presence on the film and at least one of the actors I’ve read about says Emmanuelle Arsan was not directing. But then, depending on what that means to you, there could have been a lot of input by her fed through to her husband who may have been more blatantly filling that role behind the scenes so… I have no idea.

The other reason I wanted to watch this one for the blog, asides from Arsan herself, is lead actress Annie Belle, who I still obsess over occasionally due to her dominant presence in Jean Rollin’s Lips Of Blood (reviewed here). Her presence is equally striking in this film and here, she’s teamed up with Al Cliver playing the photographer/moviemaker Nicholas. I think I’ve only ever seen him in Lucio Fulci horror movies to date so it was good seeing him playing something a little different to what I know him for.

The last of the four important characters from the book is Professor Gaultier Morgan, played here by Orso Maria Guerrini.

And talking of the book, it’s almost all here in the movie, which turns out to be a very straight adaptation, not missing too many details, of the original novel. Not only that but it’s very well put together with some striking cinematography. For example, a shot of Cliver’s head filling screen right completely blurred with Belle’s head filling the left hand space, equally large, while water rapidly rushes around the rocks they are laying on as a constant moving background while they converse.

Another scene where Laure and Nicholas make love while her sexual exploits, as recorded by him, are used as a backdrop to them, often dominating the screen or sharing frame space equally, is quite stunning. Ditto for a torchlit greeting as their expedition’s boat reaches the shore of their landing destination at twilight. Both tranquil and spectacular simultaneously.

And there’s some nicely rendered sexual content as well. For example, when Myrte has sex with Gaultier’s wife, there is a scene where Arsan is seen licking the long protruding blossom of a flowering plant which is resting over the other woman’s vulva, this alluding to what is going on while steering clear of the censors, with the tip of the flower she sucks as a surrogate for the other woman’s clitoris.

Now then, lets get to that big old elephant in the room of underage sex which keeps coming up to sour me every time I jump into Arsan’s legacy, out of the way. Yeah, the two little girls from the first and last part of the book are in this and, unlike the movie version of Emmanuelle (reviewed here), they are played by little girls who are roughly the same age as they are in this book. However, a sex scene with the Mara girl, Myrte and Gaultier, thankfully doesn’t make it into the final cut of the movie (thank goodness). Similarly, a scene where Laure masturbates at the tea table for the little girl cuts off just before that sequence fully plays out… although it does still include the moment where she’s staring in fascination at Laure’s exposed sex. And if you’ve already read the book… you know what’s going on. So let’s all condemn that scene and just pretend it didn’t happen. Whether any of the cast had read the book and discussions were had on set is anyone’s guess. But, moving on…

Okay, so Laure is a pretty close adaptation of the original novel. So close, in fact, that I wonder if the novel and the film didn’t gestate at the same time, such as with the movie and film versions of The Girl With All The Gifts (reviewed here and here). That being said, two of my favourite sequences from the book, the ‘wet camera’ scene** and the ‘penis tree’ scene, as detailed in yesterday’s review, don’t happen in the movie version. I wonder if they attempted them and they just looked too silly or whether they didn’t even try?

And... the ending is a little different. The book ends with Myrte, Gaultier and the disillusioned Nicholas leaving Laure, who is the only one who wants to continue in the company of the Mara tribe and take part in the festival of the new sun. And that’s a good ending. Here, we see Laure take part in that ritual and… it’s a bit of a letdown, frankly. A kind of empty coda which the film just doesn’t need, at least that’s what I think.

So that’s me done with the movie adaptation of Laure. Obvious subtext aside, it’s a pretty beautiful film with a wonderful score by Franco Micalizzi (sadly out of print on CD and I’ve so far found it impossible to source a copy, if you have any reasonably priced leads on the Digitmovies CD then let me know) and, well, Emmanuelle Arsan turns in an amazingly good performance in this too. Seeming more natural and confident in her role than much of the rest of the cast, it seems to me. So even if you are just interested in seeing it for her… yeah, definitely worth a watch if you can find a copy. This definitely needs a modern Blu Ray restoration.

*Yeah, there’s no Blu Ray as of yet and, well, it took me three different ebay sellers to finally get a copy of the old Severin DVD of the film. Two said they had it, took my money and then failed to deliver the goods!

** Thanks to Austin Gentry, who jumped onto Twitter yesterday after I'd posted my review of the novel and who is researching and writing a book about Annie Belle, for the info that, when this was still considered as a project to star Linda Lovelace, the camera scene was still in the script.

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

Laure (the novel)

Tree Hugger

Laure
by Emmanuelle Arsan
Granada
ISBN 0583130291

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and condemned.

Okay, I’m going to say up front that I almost wish I hadn’t started reading some of Emmanuelle Arsan’s books for this blog because, well, I found a sinister and dark underbelly to her celebrated writing that is somehow not publicised or addressed when people discuss or write about these ‘classic’ novels... at least that I could find. 

Anyway, apart from a few scenes, I mostly enjoyed Laure and it’s a strange book. Whether it’s written by Arsan or her husband is somewhat debatable but, again, certain inconsistencies in the writing and the fact that I’d heard Arsan used to be constantly slaving away over a hot typewriter leads me to believe this was a truly collaborative effort between her and her husband.

Now then... this book tells the story of Laure, a minister’s daughter who, along with some friends who also study at the Lance Institute of Pacific Studies (LIPS... that’s subtle then), goes off into the jungle on a trek to find the mostly lost and hard to find Mara tribe and rebirth herself in the ‘ritual of the new sun’. It’s full of sexual experiences since, of course, the characters all practice the philosophies of sexuality as expounded upon already in the Emmanuelle novels. And I was kinda hoping that certain elements would not come up in this one but... oh yeah, by the end of the book, things get quite blatant concerning certain illegal practices. 

Okay, so the novel has a strange structure in that it tells the tale as first person narrative from three different characters... none of them actually Laure. So part one is called Nicholas and is seen through the eyes of Laure’s soon-to-be boyfriend and then husband, who is a photographer and film artist. This chapter lasts for about two thirds of the book. It involves a really odd sexual scene too, which I hope made it into the movie adaptation because it’s so strange, where Laure makes love to Nicholas’ camera, eventually leaving it totally covered in saliva and other bodily fluids. 

Then we have a second chapter called Myrte, which lasts only twelve pages and is told from the point of view of her character, who I believe is the character that Emmanuelle Arsan actually plays herself in the movie version of this one. It’s odd because the wedding of Nicholas and Laure, which wasn’t even something you could see coming from the first section, is mentioned as something that has already happened by this part of the story as it jumps a little in time. So... I dunno... somewhat expository dialogue dressed up as something else, I guess.

Finally, we have the last section told from the eyes of Gaultier, which also features a bizarre revenge/death scene from one of the characters, with the character who is the target of said revenge not even noticing that her enemy (she doesn’t even realise she has one) has unwittingly met his demise. Which is done quite well and almost acts like a jump scare to the reader. 

There’s also an amazing scene where the four friends find a tree with big penises growing from it (one of many such foliage it would seem), as opposed to carvings but they are identical to the real thing and give out sap when... well, you can see where this is going. Laure spends an awful lot of time making love to two such protuberances on the tree, one in her mouth and one in her nether regions (Annie Sprinkle, with her current ecosexual philosophies, would surely embrace this concept and has surely done a version of this stuff) over and over, where she possibly fertilises herself by the tree. Or so it’s set up as a possibility here. 

The end of the novel, I suspect, differs from the end of the film but I won’t know until I watch that (I went to a lot of trouble, including two bizarre dead ends to get hold of an out of print DVD of the film put out by Severin back in the day) but, I hope another way it differs is not to include the absolutely vile scenes of underage sexuality, which are somehow even more invasive than those found in the Emmanuelle books... and I really didn’t expect to see them here, they do come out of the blue, somewhat. 

But that’s enough of that other than to say, I looked into the legality of these books because I couldn’t believe they’ve been allowed to be published and, somehow through loopholes in the legal system, they’ve been allowed by various governments around the world. Which, okay, I can understand that (Lady Chatterley’s Lover etc) but, what I find unbelievable is why this element of these books has not been called out by readers over the years so people know what they’re getting into when they read these things. 

But that’s enough of my unexpected (even to me) preaching. I actually thought that, out of the three Arsan novels I’ve read, Laure was the most interesting and entertaining. Although, the writing is somewhat shaky in places because it keeps drifting between past and present tense (perhaps an unwitting sign of dual authorship?). And I’ll leave it at that... I guess the next review on here will be the movie version. So hopefully you’ll look in tomorrow. 

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

I, Emmanuelle

Erotic Breakdown

I, Emmanuelle
aka Io, Emmanuelle
aka A Man For Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle
Directed by Cesare Canevari
Italy 1968
Rofima Cinematografica
Severin Films Blu Ray
as part of their Saga Erotica Emmanuelle Collection

Warning: All the spoilers for this wonderful film. 

Wow. Just wow. 

Sometimes a Blu Ray label... and it seems @severinfilms are particularly adept at this... will put out a film that absolutely knocks your socks off, blows your mind and reminds you why you started partaking of ‘the cinematic arts’ in the first place. Which is what I, Emmanuelle did to me when I watched it but, to be honest, I was debating whether to make this review part of my Emmanuelle Arsan At NUTS4R2 strand of movies at all. And the simple reason for that is... it’s got absolutely nothing to do with Emmanuelle Arsan. 

However, I can see why Severin decided to include it as part of their Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection Blu Ray boxed set and so, since it’s such a good movie and it does have a very remote connection, I thought I’d include it here where it can get more exposure. And here’s why...

This film predates Emmanuelle (reviewed here) by five years and it wasn’t trying to bandwagon onto that movie... however, it was trying to band wagon onto the notoriety of Arsan’s original novel. Now, we’re all used to seeing Italians produce waves of knock offs around particular genres and also titles. I mean, how many spaghetti westerns which have absolutely nothing to do with Django include the name Django in their title? Hundreds, right? Well, here we have the Italians Django-ing Emmanuelle’s name onto the title of the film and calling their main character after her. But, in fact, it’s based on a short story called Disintegration ‘68, written by Graziella Di Prospero. And, I almost pity the man (or woman) in the street when this came out thinking they were walking into a sexy, erotic Emmanuelle movie because, although the film does deal with sex... it’s certainly not all that sexy and is a real downer of a movie, quite deliberately so, it seems to me. 

So the film starts with such a texturally swirling camera movement going in 360 degree circles that I initially thought there was something wrong with my Blu Ray copy, Then we get glimpses of the main star, Erika Blank, as she’s swirling around in a spinning chair. And this trope of a camera doing those loops is echoed throughout the film, sometimes with the camera itself or sometimes with a character who’s looping around on their own. It even points out the cyclic nature of the film itself and that opening camera shot is something we’ll come back to in the end with the ‘ritual of milk’ scene... we’ll get there. 

And this turns out ot be a movie about a severely depressed woman on the verge of losing herself to either a nervous breakdown or suicide. Indeed, Emmanuelle sometimes jump cuts in her head to a vision of herself landed on the street below, after she has thrown herself out of her flat, in little moments that crash into the visuals and collective audience consciousness in exactly the same way that a movie by Nicolas Roeg would do it. Completely disorienting the viewer as much as it does Emmanuelle and it’s just one small part of a sensual attack which builds up into a cacophony of visual and audio invasions on the audience. Again, as much as it does to the central character. So things like advertising slogans blaring in her head simultaneously pitched with newsreel atrocities from the Vietnam war and a ‘strung up like a puppet’ Action Man which she keeps seeing, manifesting itself in real life, as the sound of pigs eating matches the visuals of diners in a high class restaurant stuffing their faces and they suddenly turn into real life flesh versions of said Action Man. It’s amazing stuff.

So the story, such as it is, sounds like it could be a movie taking on the tenets of Emmanuelle Arsan... but it really isn’t. 

Emmanuelle can’t find her boyfriend, who has left his house without telling her he was going to be away. So this film follows her wandering the streets and spaces of Italy for the day, completely depressed and trying to find a man to sex her up. She goes through a number of lovers but, each time they start to sexy her up as she requests, she turns frigid at their touch and this ultimately ends up with her being both hostile and destructive to each suitor. For example, burning a writer’s new novel manuscript while he’s in the bath after failing to satisfy her... or stealing a charm given to a lover by his mother, in terms of the film’s most famous actor (besides the well loved Erika Blanc), Adolfo Celi (yup, Largo from Thunderball, reviewed here, is in this and, he keeps turning up in films I’ve been watching lately), playing against type somewhat as a pretty decent person, suckered into playing Emmanuelle’s game.

And as the film progresses through various encounters with people like this... including a self harming escort who burns himself with cigarettes... we watch Emmanuelle’s slow but constant and intense breakdown manifesting itself... with absolutely beautiful and often experimental cinematography. 

For instance, the director might start a shot with everything just a blur for five to ten seconds. And the sound design matches the chaotic nature of the movie, where he uses that tried and trusted cliché of switching from an intense build up of sound to total silence in the next shot, used as a transition. And the shot compositions! My gosh...

For instance, after five or so minutes of the film has gone by and Erika’s Emmanuelle takes to the streets, we see a street with two lamp posts on either side of it as we look down at her, cutting it into thirds and with her firmly placed in the middle third. Or, when she is talking to a woman in a restaurant and the woman has her head and shoulders to us, with her fingers and thumb rested against the side of her head, the rest of the shot is a blur except for... Emmanuelle’s right eye seen on left of screen, showing through the little ‘o’ of a gap created by the other woman’s hand against her head. It’s astonishing stuff, I tell you. 

If I were to try and give you a sense of what this film is like from referencing other works... well first I would say that it’s a film very much of its time, you just couldn’t make something like this today and get away with it... and that it reminded me of the kinds of surreal, contemporary prose that writers like J. G. Ballard and Thomas M. Disch used to submit to New Worlds science fiction magazine back in the sixties when Michael Moorcock was calling the shots. Or, in cinematic terms, it’s like watching Jack Cardiff’s Girl With A Motorcycle but cross pollinated with an unhealthy dose of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

So, yeah, this movie is a portrait of a woman in breakdown and she’s quite startlingly played by Erika Blanc here. Okay, so she’s a big genre star of things like Italian horror and gialli but she’s never been a favourite of mine. Here though, she looks astonishingly beautiful, even when she’s constantly suffering from stomach cramps... and, I dunno, she should have got the Italian equivalent of an Oscar for this performance. She’s absolutely stunning and it’s completely riveting. 

The last scene of the film... and this sees us deep into spoiler territory folks... sees her back on her spinning chair in her flat, a while after learning the lover who left has burned to death in a car crash earlier in the day. She nearly shoots herself but instead shoots a photo of herself and then goes through a cleansing ritual on the chair, which somehow involves her pouring milk overspilling her mouth onto her naked body (much like Salvador Dali used to say he did each morning at breakfast, after getting dressed as a kid). I didn’t really understand it, to be honest but, it looks kinda pretty and, again, like all the nude scenes in the movie (of which there are too few), it looks really great. 

And on top of that... on top of all of that... the film has an absolutely stonking score by the great Gianni Ferrio, one of my favourite Italian composers to be fair. And it’s expectedly amazing, sounding a little like the composers score for Death Walks At Midnight crashed together with his score for Death Occurred Last Night. And as the ultimate cherry on top of all of this... the vocals on the main song are sung by no less an artist as... Mina. Yup, the great Mina lends her vocalisations to this movie and it really lingers in the ear canals I can tell you that. And, thankfully, the almighty Severin Films have seen fit to include a CD of the score bundled in with this set. So, yeah, this film and its CD are well worth the price of admission alone.

And that’s me done with Io, Emmanuelle, I think. An astonishing film which lives up to that old cliché of something cinematic being an assault on the senses. I am so going to revisit this movie every few years to remind myself just why I got into watching movies in the first place. I’m sure this movie must feel like what taking a drug must feel like. Just astonishing stuff.

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

Goodbye Emmanuelle

The Goodbye Gal

Goodbye Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle 3
Directed by François Leterrier
France 1976
Severin Films Blu Ray

Warning: Some end of movie spoilers here.

Goodbye Emmanuelle is a bit of an outlier in terms of the original Emmanuelle trilogy (if you choose to group them like that… and many people do). Perhaps the giveaway is in the opening credits where it states it’s based on the character Emmanuelle rather than actually taking any of Emmanuelle Arsan’s books as a source inspiration. That would certainly explain a couple of things.

Two big things which make this stick out like a sore thumb, plus one aside about the trilogy of films’ ‘supposed’ status of softcore pornography (they’re not but then I’m loathe to pigeonhole anything under the ridiculous  label ‘art film’ either). 

One is... it’s structured like a more mainstream movie, which I’ll expand on in just a second and the other is that, despite not being based on one of Arsan’s novels, it actually, for the first third of the film, upholds the original writer and her husband’s ideologies of an open marriage with no jealousy. More so, I think, than the first two movies did. However, the rest of the movie does go on to completely betray that open spirit, it seems to me and, I suspect Arsan herself would not have been happy with the direction this movie takes.

Once again, Emmanuelle is played both sensitively and intelligently as a somewhat more naive character, it seemed to me, by the great Sylvia Kristel. And Umberto Orsini returns from the previous film as her husband Jean.

Okay, so the film actually has a storyline of sorts, dealing with Emmanuelle’s pursuit of a film director, played by Jean-Pierre Bouvierre (Kristel’s soon to be real life romantic partner Ian McShane failed the audition for this part because he couldn’t speak fluent French, it would seem), who is scouting locations in her neighbourhood. When they get it on, leading to a temporary rejection of her by this new guy, Jean becomes uncharacteristically jealous and it all ultimately leads to he and Emmanuelle splitting up at the end and her leaving the country, in pursuit of this new guy. Which, as I said, completely fails the tenets of both her characters’ and the original author’s (or authors’, depending on what you believe) philosophies on love and eroticism.

Now, the thing about the structure of the movie is that, while it has a few erotic episodes… with even less sex than the previous instalments… it’s not as episodic in feel to the previous two movies, nor indeed, the novels those movies purported to be adapting. So it’s not as loose and even the acting is more ensemble in nature than those previous two (almost as if someone had asked Robert Altman to direct an Emmanuelle movie).

There’s even a metaphor at one point, when an old man tells Emmanuelle and her latest lover a story about his wife getting eaten in front of him by a shark. It turns out not to be true and a story the guy tells because he can’t face the fact his wife ran off with another guy but, I think by this point in the film it’s more a comment of the rocky marriage of Emmanuelle and Jean in a metaphorical way, more than anything else.

The sex scenes are much more expressionistic impressions than even the previous two (which were similar but not quite as brief as these ones) but they do at least punctuate the film at regular intervals as though one of the producers, who was about to become mayor (or much higher I believe) wanted to maintain the impression that it’s still an erotic movie of sorts, without wanting to offend his voters.

Another thing is that the ensemble scenes and the noisy ‘gathering’ scenes (where Kristel performs a cute but overly long dance) have the effect of imbuing the long, quieter sequences with the impression of it being a much more reflective film than it, perhaps, actually is.

Also... different times. When Emmanuelle beds her maid at the start of the film (with her husband arriving home and joining in half way through), she has to make up a ridiculous story for her to tell the woman’s waiting husband because of his jealousy. Later on, the same housemaid has a big black eye because her husband caught her sitting on another man’s lap. But nothing in the dialogue or acting seems to express that he was wrong to hit his wife and… yeah.. like I said, different times.

The saving grace of the film (and that’s not Serge Gainsbourg’s score and his dodgy title song) is the absolutely beautiful cinematography, which matches the previous movie for sheer beauty… and of course, a fair few shots of the beautiful body of the lead actress… she seems to be very photogenic, for sure. But that’s about it for me and the movie Goodbye Emmanuelle. The film ends with a long held note of melancholy and its sad to see Sylvia’s ‘almost swan song’ - she would return briefly for the fourth to have her appearance somehow magically altered at the start by plastic surgery into a much younger actress* - in the role see her go out on such a sad note, almost of betrayal (I’m siding with Jean in this one) but there it is. It’s still an enjoyable watch though and in some ways does still feel like it belongs with the previous two, to an extent.

* I’m not quite ready to open the can of worms of Sylvia returning to the TV movies of Emmanuelle decades later... but I have looked up their availability, for sure.

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

Emmanuelle 2 - L’Anti-Vierge

 

Boat Full of Sea Men

Emmanuelle 2
Aka Emmanuelle L’anti-vierge
Directed by Francis Giacobetti
France 1975
Severin Films Blu Ray

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and sometimes condemned. 

Okay, so I enjoyed Emmanuelle 2 a little more than the first movie in the series (reviewed here). That being said, it doesn’t really play with your expectations much in that it’s more in line with what I’d expect from a soft core erotic movie of the time and, I’m sure this is probably more the film that many audiences were expecting the first film to be.

That being said, for this audience member it certainly set up unrealistic expectations because its proper French title on the print is Emmanuelle L’anti-vierge and claims to be based on that book by Emmanuelle Arsan. However, having already read that book in preparation for watching this movie (you can read my review here), I’d have to say that very little of that book works itself into the ecosystem of the film adaptation. More on that a little later.

The plot, or anti-plot in this case, since it’s almost a reboot of the previous film and it’s practically non-existent, starts with Emmanuelle getting on a boat full of sea men and then travelling on a ship, in a dormitory with a load of tempting women, to be reunited with her diplomat husband Jean, who has been away on business for a couple of months. Then, with their ‘open marriage’, the film becomes a series of sexual encounters between the two of them and various lovers.

Sylvia Kristel reprises her role as a somewhat more intelligent (it seemed to me) iteration of the character (she seems to have lost the naivete of her book incarnation to some extent here) but, this time round, her husband is played by Umberto Orsini… who seems much more likeable.

The film has fantastic cinematography and every location, with slow fluid camerawork which seems to explore the environments in order to ‘find’ the characters, looks absolutely beautiful. Needless to say (or needles to say, if commenting on the ‘sexy acupuncture’ sequence) this also goes for the sex scenes and all the actors come off well in these.

Highlights for me would be that somewhat silly but fleshly decorative acupuncture sequence, a slight scene where Emmanuelle sexes up a tattooed guy in the changing rooms of the local polo club and their sounds are expertly mingled with the sound of the match outside and the panting horses… and a six way massage scene where the two take their friend Anna-Maria (played by Catherine Rivet) to a parlour where they are laid out on three tables and given erotic, body to body massages by three women simultaneously.

And here’s the thing about that last scene I talked about. The saucy masseur who sexes up Anna-Maria is an early appearance by none other than the great Laura Gemser, who would of course begin her long, iconic run as Italy’s Black Emanuelle (with one M only, for copyright reasons) the same year.

One other scene of note is when Emmanuelle is looking through some kind of cine-viewfinder while someone takes her from behind and the BDSM, double penetration, strap-on cartoon she is watching is intercut into the sequence. I love it when live action films present prominent animated scenes as part of their make up (it’s a pretty neat cartoon actually).

Okay… so there are some problems too. A prominent character from the first book, Christopher, makes it into this movie in some scenes from that book, kinda. Anna-Maria is more baffling because she’s treated here as a completely new character, played by a different actress to the pseudo-iteration of her in the first film (who had a slightly changed character name too, if memory serves). So that’s confusing.

And a big long monologue from Jean to that character in the second book is chopped up and interspersed through three scenes, with some overlaps to other characters and versions of those sentiments from the first book. Which is actually a better way of doing it in terms of the pacing within a cinematic context, I would say.

So most of the book is gone, including some really interesting scenes, characters and locales and, I have to wonder why, since the second book seems to have many more opportunities for cinematic opulence which have all been ignored here. Certainly, Emmanuelle Arsan’s philosophy of giving oneself to anyone regardless of your own desire is not adhered to or raised here. The only moment where there is a trace of her and her husband’s outlook on life regarding that particular aspect seems to be that, after making love to three sailors (not at a prince’s party with many sailors, as in the book) in a brothel called the Jade Garden (which, again, is nothing like the secret glass palace which serves a more intense version of it in the book), she at least takes money for her services. So that, at least, is an echo of boring character Mario’s ideas (and, fortunately, he doesn’t make a similar appearance in this movie at all).

As for the vile underage sex theme which somehow subtexts the novel, I’m pleased to say it’s been circumnavigated by this version completely. Emmanuelle and Jean do, indeed, deflower Anna-Maria towards the end of the movie (both together in this version of events) but it’s clearly stated here that she’s 18 years of age… and not five years younger as in the books.

All in all, although really a lot less interesting in terms of ideas found in the book it misleadingly purports to be an adaptation of, I found Emmanuelle - L’antivierge (or Emmanuelle 2 as it is more popularly marketed as, in many countries) to be a much lighter and entertaining picture than the first although, to be fair, it does also lack the substance and gravitas of the original Emmanuelle.

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge - the novel

Arsan Around

Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
aka Further Experiences of Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle 2
By Emmanuelle Arsan 
Granada
ISBN 9780583125741

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and sometimes condemned. 

“But the borderlines of my love aren’t identical with the frontiers of her flesh.”
Jean, Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge

Originally published in a clandestine edition in 1960, following on from the ‘official publication’ of the first novel in the series from the year before (and reviewed here), Emmanuelle L’Anti Vierge has a few different titles like Further Experiences Of Emmanuelle but, the title I have managed to get hold of is a British Granada paperback tying in with the name of the second movie, Emmanuelle 2. And, of course, the actual authorship of this volume is an enigma as to whether it was Arsan or her husband writing all these novels but, I suspect it was a collaborative arrangement. Much like the declared state of being by the main character and her husband as a combined, erotic creature and, one supposes, based on the real life experiences of the two who, as I mentioned in my review of the first tome, influenced Thai culture and brought about the swinging sex scene there. Although I now suspect something far more sinister was lurking underneath that but… yeah, not sure and, all I have to go on is the subject matter of these fictionalised exploits.

Now, I have to say that I think this sequel is infinitely better than the first novel. You may remember I talked about the ‘stops dead tonal shift’ when an excessively boring character called Mario dominates the last third of the book and pontificates about the duty and intricacies of a self sacrificing erotic pathway for humanity. Well, sad to say he’s back in this one and the first twenty pages or so are more of him and his boring philosophy. However, he happily leaves the narrative for most of the book and his further interruptions are nowhere near as tiresome and, although further elucidation and exploration of his philosophy are much invoked by various characters, it’s all mixed in with the sexual shenanigans one would expect from ‘an erotic novel’ and so the pill is significantly sweetened.

Now the ‘plot’ of the novel is very simple. Emmanuelle continues to explore different lovers of various gender (and multiples thereof) throughout the tale, as part of her ‘free marriage’ to Jean, while further exploring her path extending Mario’s original line of reasoning. So, yeah, it’s very simple, for sure, but there’s a lot of interesting and downright unusual stuff going on too.

For example, a prince gives a party where Emmanuelle is sexed up by many men (and women). Another scene at a fancy dress ball where she takes part in a happily obscene tableaux as one of many dressed as specific birds conjures up satisfyingly surreal images of something like Max Ernst’s Une Semaine De Bonté or the bird mask worn in the 1960s update of Judex. Or how about being anally taken by a buddhist monk who presents a golden dildo to her in return for services rendered by her to his religion.

Another thing which features heavily in a couple of chapters is a huge glass building with thick glass walls that don’t reveal what’s going on inside due to the sheer density of glass. It’s at a hidden location and can only be entered by driving to a secret, underground entrance and being raised into the ground floor of the building. This is basically a high class brothel with very specific rules where Emmanuelle plies her trade, once her character is taken with the idea that to be truly free, one must prostitute oneself to all and sundry. It’s here, in the only truly emotional high point of the novel, that Emmanuelle finally finds her ex lover Bee but, out of conscience, rejects her advances. It’s one of three powerful moments in the novel but the other two are decidedly strange…

And are as follows…

There’s one scene where Emmanuelle is coerced by a Dr. Marais (I couldn’t find any history on whoever his real life counterpart is) who is experimenting with a course of drugs that makes women easy to control and manipulated erotically. The book turns almost into a horror novel at this point but Emmanuelle says, after her first dosage and evening of debauchery, that she will not be back for another shot and… the book makes no mention of it in the following chapters and it’s all forgotten about, it seems. Until… until, much later in the book, a headline from a newspaper is read that Marais is wanted in connection with a police enquiry regarding a dead woman found his flat. I guess it was a lucky escape for Emmanuelle but, it makes almost a weird non-sequitur of a scene, to be honest.

But not as unusual a non-sequitur as the random scene which just appears out of the blue half way through a chapter, where two lovers, fleeing an authority and being chased by dogs, end up in their dishevelled state making love in a ditch. It seems completely divorced from the content and characters in any of the rest of the book and is a bit of a curio. I was expecting the other shoe to drop later on in the novel as it did with the murderous doctor but, no... no clue. The best way, then, to take it is that maybe it’s a metaphor for the pursuit and practice of Emmanuelle and Jean’s erotic principles but, if that is the case (and I’ve no reason to assume my best guess is right here) then maybe it would have been better relocated towards the end of the book when Jean and Emmanuelle are expounding those theories.

Now, I’d hoped the underage sex thing which permeated the sensibilities of the first novel would be happily absent from this second volume and, for the most part they are. But, when they do come they are much more blatant and I really don’t know why this vile spin is allowed to be published now, even in the wake of the court cases revolving around Lady Chatterly’s Lover, I think this kind of morally reprehensible stuff has no place in adult literature. However, Emmanuelle’s treatise at one point (though discarded by the main character soon after) includes ‘younger people‘ in it and, towards the end of the book, Emmanuelle ‘deflowers’ her best friend (before dripping sperm from her own mouth into her friend’s mouth after she is taken by three brothers on a beach). Nothing wrong in that per se but, you will probably at some point remember that her friend is only 13 years old in the previous novel and that this one is set six months later. So you can do the maths on that yourself!

However, this vile ingredient of the books aside, in general I enjoyed Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge quite a lot, with the obvious exceptions. At least now I can watch the second movie with somewhat of a critical eye to adaptation. So that’s next on my list.

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

Emmanuelle

Arsan About

Emmanuelle
Directed by Just Jaeckin
France 1974 
Severin Films Blu Ray

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and condemned. 

The 1974 film adaptation of Emmanuelle was a big thing when it came out back in 1974, even to a young six year old like myself, who had already been working as a child model for the last five years. I remember, whenever I went down into London to do a shoot, the posters for the film were on display in places like the tube stations in London... not to mention the book being sold in ‘most reputable book shops’. The two posters I specifically remember were the very clever drawing of the snake symbolising temptation, unwrapping its coils from around an apple shape which turned out to be a lady’s derriere plus, of course, the famous Wicker Chair shot of lead actress Sylvia Kristel, which I think was also used in various newspapers and magazines like Time Out, to sell the film. 

And this is actually, kind of, a good adaptation of the book Emmanuelle (which I reviewed just here) but with scenes rearranged a little and some characters either cut out or, in one case, given a bit of a resolution. There is also a contentious addition which I’ll talk about too... which puzzles me a little, both in terms of what the heck it’s doing here and also why the lead actress was pressured into doing it.

First of all... the film is beautifully shot and edited. Sweeping views with establishing shots which sometimes have the actors walking into the back of the shot (which is a good idea and really works) and even some beautiful, pace changing, hand held camera movements in a couple of scenes which really add to the atmosphere of the story. Such as when a houseboy chases one of the maids around the grounds of Emmanuelle and Jean’s house. Incidentally, her husband Jean is played here by Daniel Sarky but, the way the character is written here is with a more emotional viewpoint... so there are times when he feels the absence of Emmanuelle when she’s off galavanting. Which, I won’t lie, detracts from the spirit of the novel a little bit.

And it’s rather well acted too, particularly by Sylvia Kristel, who gives a very naturalistic performance. It’s quite a striking turn in a way because, even from the opening scenes where she gets up and prepares her breakfast (in a not dissimilar sequence in intent to the opening of the movie version of The IPCRESS File, reviewed here, where Michael Caine goes through a similar preparatory routine), she uses her facial expressions and body language in a very considered performance but, at the same time, it’s a performance which underlines somewhat the naivete of the character... so, yeah, I can immediately see why audiences were drawn to Kristel’s rising star... not in terms of her looks (yeah, she looks fine, obviously) but more from the way her screen presence takes over.  

I’m not going to go through the whole story because it’s almost exactly the same as the book which I reviewed on the link earlier... Emmanuelle joining her husband in Thailand and having sexual encounters with various men and women... but there are differences. 

For example, her infatuation with the character of Bee is expanded and handled in a much more satisfying way... showing the love the two women share and ending with Bee’s ultimate rejection here... whereas in the novel she just kind of quickly drifted out of the narrative in a non-commital way.  And there are things like the relocation of the opening plane sex sequences from the book, replaced to a flashback sequence later in the movie (and with no children watching in this version, thank goodness).

Now then... the intensely boring scenes with Mario, played here by Alain Cuny, are downsized and made less boring by the way it’s presented in different locations in a kind of montage but... there’s a scene here where he takes Emmanuelle to be gang raped and, while the philosophy behind the character does support this kind of act in the book (and I was surprised something like this never happened in the book itself), it’s shown in a brutal way but with absolutely no consequences and change in the relationship between Emmanuelle and Mario after. And, yeah, I did think it was kind of going against the spirit of the novel here, to be sure. 

Now here’s a thing about that last point... Kristel did not want to do that scene but the director was insistent because it was in the book. Which makes me wonder if a) Kristel had actually read the book or b) if there’s a more expanded version of the book I’ve not read because, honestly, I finished the book two days before I watched the movie and I don’t remember this scene in there. 

Now then, the obvious  problem of underage sex which bizarrely permeates the book is not actually present in the film... except it is. Basically, if you know the book then you kind of know what’s going on in certain scenes and, if you’ve not read the book, no disclosures about the ages of certain characters are given. For instance, Emmanuelle’s masturbatory and dominant friend Marie-Ange was played here by Christine Boisson, who shot this film when she was just seventeen and, though she looks very young in the movie, there’s nothing given away here vocally that the character is supposed to be 13 years old. It’s all very iffy and I was torn between my love of a faithful adaptation and the fact that, nobody wants to see underage sex in anything thank you very much. So that material is not nearly as insidious in its inclusion as it was in Emmanuelle Arsan’s original book but, if you know the book then it’s kinda there if you want it. And if you want it then there’s probably something wrong with you, to be honest. 

This beautiful transfer of the film I watched is part of Severin’s wonderful Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection, which includes both the slightly shorter Director’s Cut and also the original release version, which is what I watched, that includes the small sequence the director didn’t want in of the Thai lady using her vagina to puff away on a cigarette as part of her nightclub act. And that’s me just about done with the 1974 adaptation of Emmanuelle but... I’m certainly not done with the character and her various, spelling challenged spin offs yet. See you back here tomorrow, I hope.

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection